


The Sunlight Makers

by Acaulix



Category: Gundam, IBO - Fandom, 機動戦士ガンダム 鉄血のオルフェンズ | Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans
Genre: Angst, Gundam IBO, I just want them to be happy, IBO, Iron blooded orphans, M/M, Sad, Tekkadan - Freeform, Yamagi has a daughter, gundam Iron blooded orphans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 15:23:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11877342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acaulix/pseuds/Acaulix
Summary: It's been years since Norba Shino died, and Yamagi has still yet to move on.





	The Sunlight Makers

**Author's Note:**

> Please enjoy this 2am how-do-i-stop-crying-over-Norba-Shino mess of a fic. Comments and feedback appreciated! xx

At night sometimes, when Yamagi is sitting alone in the stillness of his oak kitchen table and the moon is dusting over the floor tiles, he likes to stare out over the city scape.

His town is always bristling with life at night, music and the salty smell of fresh dough drifting in through his open window and billowing the silken curtains. Street signs paint the inside of his house with fluorescent lights (pink from a bar entrance, and then blue from a shopping outlet), and the colours sway across his floor in a beautiful dance, swallowing the tile floor in their midst. Beyond them brick buildings tower over everything, receding into the distance in the rise and fall of grey spikes, and near the edge of the city - falling along the horizon - a stretch of grass blooms pink flowers and stalks of corn.

It seems far from Yamagi, years away, and makes him hunger for the distance from the city life he remembers having grown up with.

Below him, in the alleyway huddled in between his apartment and the next one over (even with his moderate reading skills he couldn’t understand its name) teenagers - wrapped in jackets and scarves to fend off the cold weather - piece together copper coins found underneath seat cushions and in the gutters of sidewalks. They compile them all into one, turning out pockets and patting down sleeves, before sending off two boys, both of whom tower over the others.

They return moments later with the cheapest bottle of white vodka their near bare pockets could buy, handing them out before collapsing on top of the damp concrete underneath his complex, and the rest of the teenagers pass the bottles around with exhausted eyes. City lights flash behind them as they curl up on the backs of spread jackets, fingers grasping at each others hands and pulling with already drunken limbs, and their voices - ruff from the strong alcohol in their throats - carry up in whispers until they fade away with frosty breaths.

They make Yamagi feel miserable, like he’s looking down at a distant memory, and he blinks hard- as though they are a trick of the light that will fade away. But when he opens his eyes they are still there, laying amongst each other, and his eyes are swollen with tears he doesn’t remembered crying.

Yamagi is jerked out of his dreamy state as the padding of sock-covered feet approach the kitchen. He turns, swiveling around in his chair, and the chubby face of his daughter is staring – curiously - up into his red eyes. Her hand is pressed under the hem of her shirt, splayed against the warmth of her stomach, and she squints her tiny eyes. Her lips are swollen and red where they had been pursed around her thumbs, a habit he had seen her do many a time despite her claims that _sucking fingers is for babies! And I’m not a baby anymore!_

He smiles down at her and leans forward in his chair, offering a hand. Never mind that its past midnight and she should be sleeping, his chin is trembling with relief at the sight of her.

“What are you doing up this late, Miss,” Yamagi asks, and she waddles her pudgy feet over to the side of his chair, lifting her free hand and letting it fall down onto the flesh of his knee. Her skin is warm against his own and she smells like home; like too much talcum powder stuck to her fingers, sheets spread with fresh linen, and the field of flowers at the end of the city. Her eyes glow in the darkness of the room, as though she carries her own sunlight inside of her; balled up in her fists and squeezed between her pouty lips, and Yamagi can hardly stare at her without squinting, she’s far too bright.

“I’m hungry,” she answers, and her stomach rumbles in agreeance with her complaint.

Yamagi ruffles her hair between his fingers (it’s soft, and splays across her face in golden strands) and offers her a comforting smile. “Hot chocolate, how about it?” he says, and though it isn’t food the little girl nods anyways, face lighting up.

The hot chocolate powder is nearly empty from being knocked onto the floor by his careless elbows and he dumps what’s left of it into a disposable cup – he has always preferred them to mugs, they make everything taste more expensive and less like it’s been brewed over cramped kitchen tiles at midnight – tapping the sides to get it all out. The water boils quickly atop the red-hot gas range and the small room becomes steamy, humid with evaporation.

The powder and water together smell like her too, like her sunlight, and he drizzles cinnamon over the chocolate film that is forming on top.

When he brings the cup to her, sealed with a white lid and pinched between his fingers, she has already hoisted herself up into his seat in his absence and he sits the hot chocolate down in front of her eager hands. There is no coaster, and the table finish fogs with condensation and heat where another stain would soon be added to countless others.

She attacks the liquid with an eager mouth. Beads of chocolate run down her chin and drip onto the floor amongst dust bunnies and pastry crumbs, discarded to be cleaned later. She tips it back despite Yamagi’s warning to slow down before she burns her throat, and her eyes prickle with exhaustion as she pulls it away from her mouth and breathes deeply. He’s only half listening when she tells him it needs more sugar- marshmallows definitely – before raising it to her lips once again.

“Daddy,” She says and Yamagi nods. “I can’t sleep…maybe you can tell me a story?”

He stares down at her, unmoving.

As it is, none of the stories he has are fit for a child of her age (or even a child of his age at the time) and he stumbles over his words as he blindly searches for an alternative. His eyes flicker around the room, from the outdated wallpaper to the small fireplace tucked into the corner, and then back again, before he finally spots a little white box huddled on top of the window sill. A corner of the curtain had been shielding it from his view and it is stained with dirty fingerprints and grey with dust when he picks it up, and his daughter watches intently as he slides his palm over the lid. Dust clumps beneath his fingers and falls to the floor, scattering under the glow of the moonlight.

“What are these?”

“Photographs,” he says. “They say each picture in itself can hold a thousand words.” His daughter’s eyes light up with understanding and she shakes the cup clutched between her little hands in excitement. “It must be a very long story then!” she says, and Yamagi nods in agreement.

It is a very long story, indeed.

The town has come alive outside of his window once again and he can once again hear the rev of cars speeding down the road and the thrum of music beneath his feet. Pink lights are flashing across the tile floor and lid of the box is swallowed in the colour as it falls, clattering on the ground.

Yamagi turns the box upside down and shakes it once, then once more, until gradually the glossy photos begin to flutter down to the surface of the table. They are smudged with old finger prints, his mainly.

“Who are these people?” His daughter says, gawking at the collection.

“They’re my family; in addition to you,” Yamagi answers, and presses a kiss to her forehead as she looks up at him with wide eyes.

It takes time, and a delicate hand reaching over his daughters shoulder to sort all the photos out, (she helps, mainly by flipping the same photo around and around again until she’s satisfied with how it looks). They sit raised on top of the tables collection of sugar flakes and pastry crumbs, and he can see the faces of his friends staring up at him, beaming, and scowling, and holding onto each others shoulders, and to him they feel as distant as the field at the edge of the horizon.

“This guy here. Who is he?”

Her chubby hand sits on the photo closest to her – the one she had been turning in her hands a few moments ago – and her finger is flush against someone’s chin. The boy’s eyes are burning in the image, bright with passion and fire, in stark contrast to the lines of exhaustion pressed into the skin underneath his eyes, however he does not look tired. The corner of his mouth is curled into a grin and his dark hands hold up the back of a green jacket. The red flower of Tekkadan is printed onto the back in fresh ink, still glossy and wet, and his chin is tilted with pride.

“Orga Itsuka,” Yamagi answers, and the name feels like dust on his tongue.

“He’s handsome,” she says, and Yamagi tells her she’s far too young to be calling men (boys) handsome. He doesn’t mean it, not really, and after a moment he agrees.

“He was our leader,” he says, and his daughter is staring up at him expectantly now, mouth pouted open.

“Like my teacher?” his daughter asks, and Yamagi agrees that yes, at times he was certainly something like that, and at other times he was something far more.

Back when Yamagi had been in the center of Tekkadan he had been very much isolated in the engine room, apart from Nida- the main mechanic who made sure to keep him company when the rest of Tekkadan was out. But even though Yamagi had never been in the thick of battle he remembered hearing Orga yelling orders over the crackle of his headset; to him, to Nida, to everyone. Back then he supposed they had acted like the children they were, tugging at the bottom of his jacket and demanding from him answers and direction. Now - after coming to terms with all that had happened to him - as Yamagi knows that Orga never had the answers either.

But he had provided them regardless, up until the day the screech of feedback stung Yamagi’s ears and Merribit’s voice had come over the channel, soft to hide the trembling of her hands and the thrashing of her heart. The boss is dead, she had told them. And though her hand had been cupped around the microphone he had still heard Rider’s voice shaking on the in the background, _he’s gone, he’s gone, and he’s never coming back, and it’s all my fault._

But Yamagi can’t be sad now, not when because of Orga there’s a roof over his head and he has a job, (as a car mechanic who only makes enough to scrape by - but its where he belongs) and he can feel the warmth of his daughter beside him as her fingers dance over top of the faces of his family.

And by the time her finger come to rest on Shino’s face, pinching the tip of his ear fight above his golden piercing and waving the glossy photo around, he’s smiling again, fondly.

Shino is not smiling in the photo and seems instead caught off guard, startled by the sudden appearance of a camera, and a spoon full of red soup half way up to his open mouth. His eyes are wide, and dark, with Tekkadan jacket tied around his waist in favour of his wrinkly grey tank top, cheeks flushed from exercise.

“His teeth are crooked,” is the first thing she says, and Yamagi smiles and tells her he knows, remembers noticing his uneven canines the first time they had met. Shino had smiled the brightest smile Yamagi had ever seen, and stretched out a hand covered in soot and dirt, waving in in front of his chest to shake. He hadn’t thought much of the older boy at the time, back when all he knew of him was that his hands were ruff and callused, and he smelled like cheap cologne. But over time the cologne had come to smell more and more like home, and Yamagi had gotten used to it’s musky scent ingrained into his bed and in his clothes. The two of them had been obvious in that way, the scent had followed Yamagi to breakfast every morning, and yet if the other boys had known they never mentioned it and instead left the two of them to themselves.

Yamagi had quickly come to memorise the feeling of Shino’s crooked teeth beneath his tongue too, and the taste of his swollen lips, the ridge of the scar dug under his eyebrow, and his rough strands of hair between his fingers.

When they were together years felt like days, and it had felt like no time at all had passed before Shino was sitting in the cockpit of Ryusei-go and staring up at Yamagi with fearful eyes. He can still remember the huskiness of his voice, the warm breath on his neck and the chaff kiss Shino had pressed to his lips when no one was looking. _I can’t stop now. Not now, not ever,_ he had said, _That’s the only way we’re going to win, right?_  And Yamagi had twisted up his lip, jabbing a wrench into his shoulder – with all the love in the world – and told him that he would never forgive him if he didn’t come back.

But by the time his lovers voice was crackling in through his headset, Galaxy cannon – as he had deemed it – strapped to his back and guns blazing, Yamagi already suspected that Shino was not going to return.

It wasn’t long afterwards that he watched Ryusei-Go’s torn up cockpit settle amongst the stars, sinking through the darkness of space like a beacon of light and drifting impossibly farther from him.

They did not go to retrieve his body, and Shino never did come back.

Yamagi still forgave him.

Even so, Yamagi hadn’t cried until he wandered like a drunken man into his dusty room, and laid on top of his scratchy cot, alone and cold, where there used to the warmth of skin pressed against him. His chin had trembled as he stared at the dent in his bed - after all Shino had always been much heavier then himself, and it hadn’t taken the cot long to distort under their uneven weight – and he finally understood that things for them had reached its bitter and cruel conclusion. His body wouldn’t stop trembling and his skin was frozen to the touch, face digging into the material of his jacket to drown out the sobs that tore at his body. He had cried until his chest hurt, and his eyes stung, and his fingers bled from scratching at his cot, and he finally realized that they would never be able to see the promised land - the one that had been mere fingertips out of their reach - together.

He had never seen a colder night in his life.

“Is this the man you said you’re waiting for?” His daughter asks. Yamagi nods through teary eyes. “When is he coming?”

Yamagi tells her he doesn’t know and she inspects the photo closer, shoving it in front of her eyes as though she expects to find something hidden in the lines of his face.

“Do you love him?” She asks finally. “Is that why you are waiting for him?”

Yamagi looks down at her, surprised, but even to a young child his feelings must be written all over his face as he stares down at the photo in her hands, the two people he loves most in the world so close to one another. “Yes,” he says.

“He must be coming soon then, if you love each other,” she says, “That’s what you told me, right Daddy? That people who love you will do anything for you?”

Yamagi looks away. There is sunlight in his kitchen. She is glowing beside him and lighting up the room as she speaks, and Yamagi can hardly look at her because she’s far too bright.

He has his own sunshine and he can no longer see the stain of darkness outside his window, nor can he hear slurred voices in the alleyway beneath his house, because she demands all his attention with her presence alone. Her reflection shines bright in the eyes of his friends, the ones who had stretched towards their own paradises and fallen short, died with their hands flush on the ground so he could have what they could not.

Tekkadan had created his sunlight, had pushed on to the end and stained the soil with their blood, and brought him to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yamagi had thought he wouldn’t cry more, he hadn’t in such a long time, but another salty tear manages to escape and he can feel it, warm and soft, as it glides down the side of his cheek. It gathers at his trembling chin before falling, sinking into the cracks of tile at his feet.

“That’s right,” Yamagi says, and his daughter turns away with a childish grin. “If they love you, my dear, they will do anything for you.”

***


End file.
